


the world is quiet here

by snagov



Category: The Witcher (TV)
Genre: Emotionally Constipated Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, First Time, Love, M/M, POV Jaskier | Dandelion, Pining, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-01
Updated: 2020-06-01
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:53:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24492313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snagov/pseuds/snagov
Summary: Witchers cannot love, as the tales go. (Jaskier is a bard, he knows all the tales.)
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion
Comments: 9
Kudos: 240





	the world is quiet here

_"From too much love of living,_ _  
From hope and fear set free,  
__We thank with brief thanksgiving  
__Whatever gods may be  
__That no life lives for ever;  
__That dead men rise up never;  
__That even the weariest river  
__Winds somewhere safe to sea."  
_Algernon Charles Swinburne, _The Garden of Proserpine_

Want. Strange thing, want. 

The trouble with want is that, where we are considered, there are no rules. We cannot legislate want, cannot carve it into stone. We cannot chisel it into clay tablets or onto a basalt stele. Jaskier is a bard, lingering in every tavern. He has heard all the songs and their lyrics too. All the sad stories and star-crossed rules. _How do you stop that then?_ _The wanting?_ He has wondered. There is no telling a heart. Tell me, have you ever wanted what you were not supposed to? Tell me about ache, the sounding out of empty spaces, the echo in the room. Jaskier thinks of iron-grey hair and a stoic glance across a dark room _._ (The tips of his ears burn red at the thought.)

 _I want you. I shouldn't. You aren't on the menu. You aren't allowed. You are out past fences and beyond warning signs. Keep out. Beware of the dog. No trespassing. I cannot touch you, cannot look at you. You are on the backs of my eyelids, when I fall asleep it is you I see._ (He tries to remember measurements. How tall is Geralt exactly? If Jaskier were to walk up to the too-still man, the too-frowning creature, and gather up a fist of his tunic (dark as spiders' legs, dark as sticky tar), where would their sight meet? Would Geralt reach up or down to connect the little interval between them, mouth to mouth? Jaskier doesn't know.

 _He never smiles._ _God, I can’t stand a man who doesn’t smile._ It doesn’t really matter that Geralt sometimes rubs Jaskier the wrong way around. Despite traveling together, Jaskier rarely sees the man. The Witcher spends most of his time with a sword between a monster's eyes or drunk in a tavern at night. Jaskier goes along often enough at first. After an incident with the undead, however, Geralt invites him less frequently. (He remembers very little, his body aching, copper-flavored blood pouring from the gash on his head. Geralt holding pressure on his wounds, his frown as deep as a well-dug grave.) It really wasn’t his fault that the creature had lobbed a fucking boulder at his skull. It had come so fast, he’d barely seen it before it had connected, rock and bone. So, he figures, Geralt must not like him either. Oh well. _It’s not like it matters._

It’s not that what happened doesn’t _bother_ him. He still tastes the terror and the iron blood frothing in the back of his throat. He still flinches when someone moves too quickly. It is anathema to think that the Witcher considers him incompetent. As not good enough to bring along in a skirmish. There aren’t many things Jaskier is good at but he can hold his own in a fight. You cannot be _deviant_ here without getting good with a fist.

Do you know what it means? To be deviant here? It is dangerous, it is unspoken. There is a running undercurrent. Everyone does it, a little bit. But most stop, get married, have children. Then there are the ever-unreformed. Jaskier has pride, has pulled his pride out like a cover from the hurt. He _steeps_ himself in hurt. He learns to make the first joke, learns the self-depreciation that would ever flavor his words. No one looks behind. He knows that words like daggers will come. He knows that if he is the first to cut himself, he can control where the wound lands. Do you know what it means? Jaskier knows. It is a constant awareness. He watches his voice, his words. It is a careful balance. He learns how to code himself, how to inflect his words, part his hair, walk. He knows which tavern names to drop and which bards to patronize. These pieces all add up to form a picture in a foreign language, written in deviancy and love. This horrible _queerness_ , that only someone else well-versed in the language might decipher. Might give a quick nod, point upstairs to the bedrooms. (Jaskier will go, Jaskier always goes.) One must always be careful.

When they do inevitably settle on him, across a hall or a field, he can feel the weight of those burnished eyes, heavy as anchors. (Like a void, a black hole, there is no warmth there.) Jaskier studies the other man from the corner of his eye. The sharp jaw, aquiline nose, long and unkempt hair (tangled like tree roots, pale as a ghost). Geralt is certainly not a beautiful man by anyone’s definition. He commands attention though, has the gift of keeping a crowd silent with little effort. (Not like Jaskier. Jaskier who is charming and pretty and whom no one takes seriously.)

_Fuck._

What happened in the tavern last month still humiliates him. _Why him? Fuck me, why did it have to be him?_ If only it hadn’t been the Witcher who had opened the door to the room, found Jaskier there with his face between another man's thighs. No, not Geralt. He doesn't need the Witcher’s judgment, his censure. The fact that he has been found out chokes him. The tempting toward disapproval. The Witcher has seen this. The Witcher has known his deviancy splayed open, his sexual perversions laid bare to the sky and the ugly ceiling too. God only knows what he must think. There is nothing to be proud of here. (The Witcher is above such things. Jaskier wonders if the man has ever smiled, laughed, been spoken to in the act of love.) There is nothing human nor base about the man (pale as a dead fish, eyes like empty houses), as reserved as a grave for a corpse.

“God knows what you must think of me now, after all - that.” _Please don’t think the worst._ He had leaned on a bookcase, an uneasy smile playing about his lips. (Jaskier smiles when he is happy. He also smiles when he is sad.)

“No,” Geralt had said, gold-coin eyes looking away. (They seem to bounce, desperate to settle on anything but on Jaskier’s own gaze.) The long hair had fallen into his face and he had suddenly looked years younger. (Jaskier does not know the Witcher's age. He realizes that he knows very little about the man.) His line of sight can trace the blue veins running up Geralt's long pale neck, deep into that dark start of a beard. He wonders what it would feel like to touch those veins, to hold the man’s heartbeat under the pads of his fingers. He starts slightly at the thought. “No, I think you’re brave.”

Jaskier had laughed then (sometimes all you can do is laugh). “Well, if deviancy is your gauge, I, a failed degenerate, must be absolutely the bravest man alive.”

Geralt continued, eyes reading the book titles behind the mage, determined to ignore him, “It takes a lot of bravery to live your truth in this world, no matter what others want.” 

_Don’t say things like that. It makes me believe you._ Jaskier had been quieted. “Like you, Witcher?”

The other man slowly had shaken his head, mouth pressed into a firm line. “No,” he says, “there are things I don’t -“. There is a long pause, “I'm nothing.” _Nothing,_ Jaskier had thought incredulously, _or the Butcher? The White Wolf? Nothing, or the everything between us and a darker world?_ Geralt had bid goodnight and gone up to his room. Jaskier stayed at the bar then, deep in his cups. On the way up, he pauses. See here, a heavy, dark woolen cloak tossed casually over the back of a chair. That black wool, lined with royal sea silk (like mother of pearl) and rung at the neck with bearhide. He is holding it before he realizes that he has even reached for the damn thing. He wraps the old cloak around him. The faded magics of the cloak call out to him like the siren song of the deep. This time it’s different, safer. There are still echoes of the many protective barriers cast over the man. Of the many, many shields cast to protect the bitter warrior, as he throws himself into the center of the fight like a man with a death wish. (How many times has Jaskier thanked the stars for the warrior’s ability to sense danger and to run headfirst into it?) He can smell the wool and the fur, yes, but there is something more - something that smells like cedarwood and pine, tobacco and leather. _The wind on a wide-open plain._ It’s the scent of Geralt himself, which Jaskier has only noticed occasionally and always from afar. He closes his eyes (he doesn’t mean to) and breathes in the other man. Goddammit, the very scent of the man envelopes Jaskier with the feeling of being secure and protected. It must be the residual barriers, the memory of Geralt cleaving a ghoul in twain right before his eyes. The bear fur tickles his nose. _What am I doing?_

It’s not as if he _likes_ the Witcher. Far from it. Jaskier likes easy, beautiful things. Simple, gentle as a song. He’s made an art of it. Carved out a life by rhyme and melody. Jaskier likes what he has, his heart written on a bed of lyrics. Kisses traded after nightfall, whisked away come morning. He knows what to expect. Nothing is asked of him but his body. And it feels good, so Jaskier gives in every time. (Jaskier doubts that the Witcher has ever felt love. Love teaches a man to be soft, love teaches a man to be tame. There is nothing soft nor tame about the angular and hard-edged Geralt. Black-stubbled and rough-voiced, who freezes and silences at Jaskier's off-color jokes.) 

Sometimes, when he catches the Witcher's eyes, something seems to change. To shift in the air between them. From nothing to gold and back again. Jaskier is fascinated by alchemy. He is fascinated by the act of transition of one immutable thing into another. We are all, the core, merely atoms. Every building block is identical. Jaskier knows that magic is no magical thing; it is knowledge and practice and focus about how to narrow a beam of energy at the core of a pile of atoms, to knock them down into chaos and disaster. To reform, rebuild, from the inside out into something new.

Something has shifted. He cannot figure it out.

* * *

The fire is dying. Jaskier stares at the embers. Everyone has disappeared to their beds but a small number who linger around their tables, draining their tankards. He shivers in the chill air. 

He’s sharing with Geralt tonight. 

Jaskier isn’t particularly _delighted_ by the prospect. _I wonder if he snores._ He chuckles slightly at the idea of the austere man doing something as base as drooling on his own pillow. He takes a long sip of his lager (Dwarven, not a particularly good brew.).

“Here,” says a low voice (a voice raked over gravel and coals). Jaskier looks up to see Geralt’s ever-impassive face above him, a long, pale hand reaching out to offer his cloak. (Jaskier knows that cloak, he knows how the fur is ever-so-slightly matted with dried blood in the furthest corner. He knows it smells like the Witcher’s cedar trunk and leather poultices. He doesn’t know where the pine comes from; perhaps from Geralt himself. _I wish I’d never tried the damn thing on._ ) 

“Thank you. The world would be a dim place if I froze to death. God only knows what you all would have to look at then.” A shadow moves across the other man’s face, quick as a crow. “I’ll be turning in soon.” Jaskier sighs, shifting in his hard seat. When he turns to say something to the other man, it evaporates at the fascination in Geralt’s eyes. It is unreal. Unexpected.

Jaskier swallows, his throat suddenly very dry.

"Don't wake me up," Geralt says, his eyes sharp and bright. His voice is as rough around the edges as torn paper. When he leaves, climbing the stairs to the rooms, Jaskier tries not to let his eyes follow.

“He seems happier lately,” the innkeeper says, wiping down the next table, “must be gettin’ lucky. Wouldn’t mind carving a few notches of my own in that bedpost.” 

Jaskier frowns, his drunkenness an obvious scribble on his face. "With who?"

"Whoever it is," she says, "he's got it bad."

“Are you serious? What? No - Look, I don’t know if he knows what love _is_.” Jaskier laughs, raising his glass. The innkeeper throws a sidelong glance. "Witchers don't have emotions." _They can't love. They don't love._

“I think you’re way off," she says quietly, “He’s got it bad for someone.” The world freezes and hangs itself on a different axis. Jaskier suddenly feels as if he cannot breathe. _Why? Why does this matter?_ Then, just as fierce: _Who?_

“I can't imagine -”

“Can’t you?” she says, “ _I_ can. Think about it. Think about having all of that determination. That focus and passion aimed right at you? I could get drunk off of that.” She looks lasciviously his way, “If I wasn’t certain he’s ass over end for someone, hell - “ 

And he does, Jaskier can see it. He can imagine it. He has been way off the mark this entire time. Perhaps he has known all along, has lied to himself to make it simpler. He knows instantly that Geralt is not, as he would have others believe, a man without feeling. This is a man who feels too much, who hides it because he is _too much_ and _too fast_ and _too intense_. Love is big and wild. Love is terrifying. Jaskier swallows, uneasy on the bench. (He knows that to love a man like Geralt would feel like drowning.) 

“Who?” He chokes out. Suddenly he needs to know. _It doesn’t matter. It isn’t me. What are the odds, you vile thing, that he would prefer men, prefer you of all men? You would corrupt him. Taint him. He is so much more. He is the Witcher. You're just a bard. No, it doesn’t matter._ His head is a cacophony, there is so much. There is too much. (Jaskier would like to go to the stars, up in the black blankness of space where there is no atmosphere. It is a void, with no medium, no vibrato atoms nor molecules to transfer sound or heat. It is absolute silence. He has never had a life without the voices of others. He would like to hear the silence.)

_He doesn’t like you anyway. It doesn’t matter._

Several pints later, as he fumbles toward his room, Jaskier wraps the cloak tighter around him. It _is_ cold. He is surprised to find a hot water bottle already in his bedroll. This is uncommon, even in this inn. This was not the forethought of the innkeeper. This was certainly Geralt. 

Geralt who has perfectly even deep breathing, as if in sleep. It is, rather, too even.

“Thank you,” he whispers in the dark. There is a very long pause. Minutes pass.

“Don’t mention it,” comes the gravel reply. From dark to dark. Jaskier turns in the bed and lifts his chin at the voice. The other man’s eyes are dark in the shadows of the room. Flat. His voice expressionless. It is worse now, knowing how Geralt's body weighs down the bed. He is never unaware of the Witcher’s presence. He can feel the weight of that somber stare across the table, on the road, at meals, during battle. He wonders why Geralt watches _him_ , of all people, so closely. _Is it because of that fuckup with the undead? Is he waiting for me to fuck up again?_

“If you think - well, about what you saw, in the other inn - I won't - I mean, I won't _try_ anything. Like _that._ I'm not that weak.” Jaskier laughs uselessly. At himself, at the situation too. At the lie in his own throat. _Aren't I? I am, how I am. You have no idea. But I'm not that stupid._

Geralt doesn't move away. Doesn't laugh at him. Jaskier is used to sharp edges and ulterior motives. He had not seen the gentleness in Geralt at first. He sees it everywhere now.

Geralt is silent. Jaskier swallows, his neck as nervous as the rest of him. Geralt shifts and looks away. The slightest flush creeping up his pale neck, rounding his Adam’s apple, up through the forest of his stubble, alighting on the bridge of his hawkish nose, his cheekbones. Jaskier suddenly _knows._ (He still needs to hear it. But his heart knows, his body knows. He feels like flying.) And Jaskier knows without a shadow of a doubt that Geralt will never say anything. He will flush and turn away now (look there, at the man’s shoulders turning, his stance adjusting, already ready to leave) and never speak of this again. 

_It’s not that he doesn’t want this,_ Jaskier realizes, _he doesn’t know how. Shit. Fuck. He’s terrified. He's actually afraid of - Me? (Absurd.)_

"Right."

"You could kill me," Jaskier whispers.

Geralt grunts. It's not a denial.

“But if you ever wanted,” Jaskier spreads his hands, his long fingers, spreading out the wrinkles of the bedsheets. The weight of Geralt next to him is constant. A promise. They constantly circle, dance to unsung songs. Geralt never dances, except here, around Jaskier. (You can run so far away, Witcher, but space is not that forgiving. There is so much nothingness, nothing to block, nothing to get in the way. On a good night, from a clear plain with little light pollution, one can see twenty-quadrillion miles into the sky. Jaskier thinks this number sounds absurd but he trusts the arithmancers and knows in his heart, in his blood, his bones that it is the truth. Jaskier knows there is nowhere to hide; he has tried.)

Jaskier’s hand flashes up to Geralt’s arm, stopping the man in his awkward turn to the side. Their eyes connect, river-blue to grain-gold (Jaskier’s like nebulae, Geralt’s like collapsing stars.) and Jaskier wonders for a brief moment how he could have missed this all this time. The pupils (barely visible in the night against the dark irises) blown wide with want and fear, the hitch in the breath, Geralt is both solid and shaking below the light touch. The other man looks from Jaskier’s eyes to his lips and back again, tongue darting out to lick his own. 

_Alchemy,_ Jaskier thinks, _Transmutation. Break it down into the smallest pieces and restart._ He surges forward, pressing his lips to Geralt’s and feeling the other man arch into his touch. The Witcher's wide shoulders are trembling (there is no other word for it) and Jaskier thinks Geralt’s skin might leave burn marks on him, he is so warm. “Please,” Geralt whispers, “please.” Jaskier does not know what that means, but he knows the way the man is gripping at him. _He wants me. How - why - fuck._

“I didn’t know,” Jaskier whispers, “How -” Geralt shakes his head, his dark eyes wide and fascinated. (Jaskier is drowning in them. How could he think there was no warmth here? These are embers, eyes of amber and censer-gold. This is a pit of sweet, sticky honey and he has never been good at swimming.)

Jaskier glances away, windcolor on his cheekbones. _Are you certain?_ Tell me you are certain. Before this, before the point of touch. Kissing is an epoch, we cannot come back from that. There is before a kiss. there is after. We can go on like this forever, you know, leaning against opposite walls at a party. You will only know I love you by the smile I bite back, by the hiccup of my breath. How I watch you because how could I not watch the sun? We write lying rules about love. _Don’t go off just falling in love with anyone. There are people who are off-limits._ But hearts don’t speak in legal terms. The only law, if you fall in love with someone you shouldn’t, is to not talk about it. 

“We shouldn't,” Geralt whispers, rough fingers at Jaskier's throat, his mouth pressed into the soft space behind his ears. “Fuck, _I_ shouldn’t do this.” 

Jaskier has never been good at rules. They, neither of them, are.

“You ass," Jaskier laughs nervously into the man’s neck, "shut up and kiss me." He leans in to take. Geralt gives willingly, enthusiastically, turning up to the sun. His mouth there under the first press of Jaskier's lips, this questioning knock of skin to skin. His hands come to rest on Geralt's chest, his eyes slammed shut.

“What do you want?” Jaskier whispers, a ruin against Geralt's mouth.

Geralt pauses, his hands gripping Jaskier’s shoulders, “I don't know.” His pale hair in his eyes, brushing Jaskier’s own sweat-dipped locks away. “Fuck,” Geralt says, “I want you.” Jaskier doesn’t understand, he is at sea. Waves of warmth wash over him, his stomach clenches. Where his fingers have trailed over the man’s skin, Geralt smells of the bard. Hop-heavy ale, sandalwood hair oil. 

“How?” _What do you think about?_

“I want - ” Geralt’s fingers trace circles on Jaskier’s hand, his pale skin. Storm-tossed silence again.

Jaskier kisses him, his rough-stubble chin. "Cause, you know, I rather want to spend months between your thighs. Your cock stopping my throat."

" _Fuck_ ," Geralt hisses.

 _You’ll ruin me._ Jaskier kisses him again, swallowing a quiet moan released into the air. 

Geralt continues quietly, “Yeah. Shit,” There is a flush on his face, “I want to come down your throat.”

“What do _you_ want?” Geralt asks. Again, that awful question. (He’d thought he could do this.) _I want to call you mine. I love you. (I don’t want to love you like this.) I want you to want me and only me. I want you to feel like if I leave you will never be able to breathe again. I want to be the air in your lungs, the oxygen in your bloodstream, the electrical impulses firing from one nerve to another. I want to be needed and necessary. Oh, well then. Here we go._

"Hey, just fun, right, it's just - foolishness.” He runs his hand over the duvet cover, smoothing it out over and over again. He waits. _Foolish_ , that’s the word. Curse his foolish heart. “I -” 

“Foolishness,” Geralt repeats in a whisper. His spiderweb hair spread across the pillows, a silver fade against cotton. Jaskier shifts up, pressing his hand in the center of Geralt's chest to steady himself as he finds his place, there between well-turned thighs. Geralt, a steady constant beneath him, smells like salt and sweat. He kisses that left corner of his chest, the place where a Witcher's heart should not be found, and feels the rapid pulse below his lips. _I love you. You're not who you say you are. (I like you better this way.)_ Jaskier's song-heavy mouth moves down Geralt's stomach, nose lost in a trail of hair and knowing that he might find dried blood, might catch the iron taste between his teeth, that these hands in his own hair have ended more lives than Jaskier knows songs. 

_It doesn't matter. I love you._

When Jaskier takes Geralt into his mouth, the fingers in his hair tighten, pulling at him from the root first. This darkly flushed cock in his mouth, slick and heavy on his tongue. He watches from there, caught safely in the cup of Geralt's hips, as Geralt's sharp features tilt upwards. His razor's-edge jaw tilted toward the ceiling, his silence practiced even in pleasure. Geralt cries out silently, his mouth opens with a voiceless scream as Jaskier licks up the length of him, stumbling over ridges and veins, a curve to the left. 

"God, you're fucking good at that," Geralt mutters, his words caught in his biting teeth. Jaskier wraps his hand around the base of Geralt's cock, pulling gently, setting a rhythm. Salt in his mouth, bitter as acid. As burnt radicchio. _Fuck, I've wanted you. I've wanted you from the moment I saw you, sitting in that corner and saying nothing. Say something to me. Say anything at all, tell me how it feels while I'm down here, my mouth on you, making you come. I'll pull the tension out of you, make you come over and over and over again until you've forgotten every shadow in the night._

When Geralt comes, it's with his iron-grey hair scattered and his teeth dug into his lower lip to keep quiet. Jaskier lingers, swallowing until there is nothing left, kissing the briarpatch of curls there on Geralt's solar plexus.

Their breathing is harsh in the empty, dark room. No one says _I love you._ No one says anything at all. But Geralt's hands pull Jaskier up toward his mouth, silently against him, a pressed-in kiss. A desperate something, a _here I am, open up, take me in_. Geralt kisses harshly, in the only way he knows how. Jaskier kisses back, measured as a metronome, giving steadiness where he finds none. Strong fingers grip his arms, his back, pull at his impatient hips and shrug the tunic from his shoulders.

_(I can love you like this. Songless and in rented rooms. It doesn't have to be perfect. It can just be this.)_

“Fuck me,” Jaskier whispers. 

Geralt closes his eyes, hissing slightly in the dark. “Yeah. Come here.” He moves to lay Jaskier down. Spreads his narrow form out over the bed, the sweat-damp sheets. 

A song has two parts. The rhythm and the melody. They find the (hopeful) oil in Jaskier’s bag, Geralt opens him slowly, speared on his fingers and silent tongue. When Geralt covers him, sinking like a ship into his body, Jaskier gasps in the dark. (It’s fine. There is only the ceiling there to bear witness. Only the walls.) His body opens like a starved man’s stomach. There is the ache of being stretched, the shock of being filled. The deep pleasure of fullness. Jaskier bears down and bears witness to Geralt's body, kissing benedictions into the Witcher's gasping mouth.

“I’ve thought about this,” Geralt whispers, his breath hot on the shell-curl of Jaskier’s ear, “Every _fucking_ day since seeing you with him.”

“Did you?”

“Yes,” Geralt says, snapping his hips in, his fingers in the clay of Jaskier’s hips, molding him as they like.

"You were jealous." His hands tugging at those shoulders, finding the entire world sunk safely into his own body. The world is broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped. The world has eyes like a sunrise and hair like steel and fucks deeply, gasping hot breath into Jaskier's mouth and the divot of his throat. 

"Yeah," Geralt whispers, tightening his hands. 

"You _like_ me." A teasing grin curls at the corner of Jaskier's mouth. Light in his pale eyes. "Admit it, why don't - _oh!_ " His voice cut off by Geralt wrapping his sandpaper-skin fingers around Jaskier's cock, pressed between their stomachs, sliding a rough thumb over the wet tip of him. "Oh _god_."

"You're so _fucking_ beautiful," Geralt gasps. His body picks up pace. Jaskier's legs open wider, wrapping around Geralt's hips, pulling him deeper in. _Don't you dare ever leave. Not now that you're here, deep inside of me._

"Fuck me," Jaskier gasps. He says _fuck me_ so that he might not say _I love you._

See how Geralt's brows dig deep, how he presses a furious kiss into Jaskier's mouth, keeping the both of them silent when there is too much that could be spilled, could be said. He fucks instead, hard into Jaskier's needy body, there into the wet warmth of him, aching for some kind of completion. When Jaskier comes, held in Geralt's capable hands, he cries out against a firm kiss. He cries out into lips that have never sung a song, a tongue that cannot carry a tune. "I need you," he says, because it is not _I love you_ but what we say adjacent to it. It means the same thing, the same ache, not yet allowed to come in. The prelude. The opening bars. The start of what's to come.

 _I love you_ is a nervous visitor, hesitating to say hello. Too nervous to come in from the cold.

Geralt pulls at him hard as he comes, his dark brows furrowed and deep lines in his grave face. His hands cupping the back of Jaskier's head, his mouth buried in Jaskier's neck, keeping his mouth full. Keeping his tongue stoppered. When he falls into the sheets, there against Jaskier's slowing heart, his arms are open. Perhaps magnetic force can be blamed for how Jaskier finds himself curling up inside those arms, for how his head finds a carved-out rest on Geralt’s shoulder. For how they keep finding spaces in each other with exactly enough room. Well-matched. A set. Song and dance. Lyrics and music too. Jaskier sings and Geralt plays the rhythm, something steady underneath it all. Something to call him home to. 

His hands trace circles on Geralt's cooling skin, feeling the pulse slow beneath his touch. There is a hand steadily running through his own hair, constant and surprisingly soft. Jaskier and his wide eyes, counting the thrushes. The blush has gone past Geralt's face, his cheeks, his nose. Jaskier watches it snake like a river down his throat, blotchy and strange, a red algae flush. Across the chest, yes, like a river pours into the sea. 

"You're loud when you think," Geralt murmurs, looking away and up toward the ceiling. "Spit it out."

Jaskier swallows. "You know, all the songs - "

"You know what I think of songs."

"Yes, well," he says, closing his eyes and counting the rhythm of the heartbeat held in his hands. "You know me."

That grunt again. _If I didn't know any better, you almost sound fond._

"I heard Witchers don't have emotions. Feelings, all that kind of soft rot. You know. Song things. Involvements. Just - " Jaskier realizes he has never been in love before. Love leaves traces and scars. He knows he will not come away from this unscathed. He is petrified. _What will happen to us? What about - after?_ (He is not allowed to ask. He will take what he is given.)

"So I've heard."

Jaskier holds his breath. "Is it true?"

The hand stills in his hair. Shadows etch across the walls and the heart continues in Jaskier's open palms, a rhythm for an unfinished song. "Might be."

"'Course. Yeah." Jaskier nods, his eyes closed and Geralt's fingers moving up and down along the short hairs on the back of his neck. 

"I'll let you know in the morning." 

_You fucking idiot, you goddamn fucking idiot. Godfuckingdammit._ Jaskier grits his teeth. He should have listened, should have listened, should have listened to the knock of himself, out past fences and warning of fire and quicksand. (Ask me, ask me, how do you know of these things? Have you ever fallen in love when you shouldn’t have? It is the same story everywhere, written in all hearts, across all knifescowl frowns. _Tell me the one about the tomfool lover._ And I must ask, _which one?_ )

There is a room, borrowed for a few pieces of gold for one night only. The moon creeps in through hastily-drawn curtains, finding two men curled up like apostrophes might, these marks of possession, claiming each other on a straw mattress and sweat-soaked linens. There, in the rag-and-bone shop of Jaskier's uncertain heart, is the sketched-out skeleton of an unfinished song, waiting for the heartbeat to give it rhythm and give it life. Melody and rhythm. The lyrics on his tongue, unsaid and unwritten. Unconfessed. Jaskier knows what they are. It's not yet time to test the alchemy of these words, to shift what they have and hope for gold. He ties his fingers and Geralt's into a knot, his mouth a dropped kiss on a scarred shoulder. 

Jaskier is a bard, he knows every song in the world. Hear his heart beating out the familiar rhythm, _I love you, I love you, I love you._ In the morning, the birds will sing. In the morning, he might too.

Here, cupped in warm arms tonight, the watching world is quiet.

**Author's Note:**

> Part of the conversation is borrowed from a conversation between Dorian and the Inquisitor in Dragon Age: Inquisition. Reuploaded fic after I'd removed it once.


End file.
